Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

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She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for 'her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time'. Like many others, he fought a nuclear disaster with no protective gear at all (it becomes clear elsewhere in the book that these first responders quite literally saved Europe—if the fire had spread to the other three reactors, the consequences would have been much worse).

A loss whose greatest element was imposed on the children, youngsters who came to experience illnesses and painful death, one worsened by being torn from all they knew by forces beyond their understanding to experience sickness they were not responsible for. I don’t think I’ve ever come away from a single book with such a comprehensive understanding of a historical moment, as seen through the eyes of the people who experienced it. Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors, crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love. You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. Alexievich's documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so - but it's a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book.Alexievich’s documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so – but it’s a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come, while officials tried to hush up the accident. She talked with residents of the surrounding villages, soldiers recruited to help with the cleanup efforts, politicians, academics, nuclear scientists, farmers, teachers, widows, and children in hospital wards, and what she accomplishes within this fairly slim volume is quite remarkable. The book relates the psychological and personal tragedy of the Chernobyl accident, and explores the experiences of individuals and how the disaster affected their lives. Alexievich was not interested in conventional responses, the kind of thing people say to journalists when they are shy, afraid of controversy or anxious to please.

It offers us a 360 degree view into the human dimension of a large-scale tragedy, not just in the immediate aftermath but in the unconscionable handling of the disaster through deliberate obfuscation and misinformation. It is almost inviduous to pick out any one part of this account, but its conclusions are laid out in the words of Valentina Timofeyevna Apanaasevich, the wife of just one of a team of workers drafted by the Soviet authorities to work in the contaminated zone. This book gives a voice to the anger, pain, and heartbreak, but it is seldom an easy voice to listen to, because it forces the reader to confront how little they really know about what will one day be remembered among the most significant events of the 20th century. The HBO television miniseries Chernobyl often relies on the memories of Pripyat locals, as told by Svetlana Alexievich in her book.Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. The book is a collation of testimonies from Chernobyl survivors, their loved ones, as well as professionals and other individuals affected by the disaster, personally or professionally. The scale of the devastation and its insidious nature are perhaps beyond the power of the individual mind to imagine, which is one good reason why the polyphonic form Alexievich has made her own (and for which she won the Nobel prize for literature last year) is so appropriate.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget. Beyond all the intensely painful experiences of the individual, there is a sub-plot, one whose all encompassing reach tells of the fate of an entire people whose homes lay within the contaminated zone, a people whose timeless and gentle existence was uprooted.What complicates the story is that Lyudmila is pregnant with their first child, and she knows that being with her husband will damage both herself and the baby. There is a depth and intensity to the suffering of those people affected by the Chernobyl disaster which Svetlana Alexievich has succeeded in capturing through her interviews. The author allows the words of those who lived, and many who still live, in the affected areas to tell their own story. People muse about mortality and time, quote Tolstoy and Andreyev, wonder about remembering and forgetting, and much more. At which point, when you consider the extent to which she has been traversing the irradiated landscape, you realise she has put herself on the line in a way very few authors ever do.

So she stays by his side, and she helps him through the fortnight it takes him to die, as his skin starts peeling off and all his colleagues die one by one. Alexievich interviewed more than 500 eyewitnesses, including firefighters, liquidators (members of the cleanup team), politicians, physicians, physicists, and ordinary citizens over a period of 10 years. Of illness, death, birth defects, the loss of loved ones, the way the disaster was not dealt with effectively and of the heroism of those who went in, trustingly, to try to stop the unbelievable being even worse.A true history of its people need be no more than the howls of despair of millions of voices, punctuated by moments of incredible tenderness, courage and grim humour. The real Chernobyl: HBO's hit miniseries is ending, and here's how its characters compare to their real-life counterparts". Some are experts like atomic scientists, doctors, politicians and engineers, but most are ordinary people who got caught up in the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine and the subsequent spread of radiation which, because of the wind direction, spread mostly across Belarus (23% of Belarus’s land is contaminated, the cancer rate has risen 74-fold, and only one person in 14 dies of old age). Men whose wives and children would come to share in the death, if not of life itself, but in the end of the hopes and dreams that make an ordinary existence one with some joy. I think it can be safely said that for the majority of Russians, over the greater part of recorded history, to have been born in that country has not been to draw one of the winning tickets in the lottery of life.